startup

Success is often scary.

There is no SUCCESS without change; there is no change without fear (or loss); and there is no loss without pain. Change requires making choices. It’s not enough to dream of changing. It’s not enough to desire change. In order for you to change, you will need to make a decision. You must choose to change. The battle starts in your mind, not in your behavior. The way you think determines the way you feel, and the way you feel determines the way you act. If you want to change the way you act, you start by changing the way you think. The way you think about success!

THREE things that say you’re ready for success:

Ready for change – You desire a real change in your business and are willing to put forth the effort.

Dedicated – Your business is unique, and you are open to exploring new ways of doing it.

Open-mind – You are open to discovering approaches and even mindset shifts that you haven’t known before.

Some of you are stuck in the middle, and you’re just going through doing business because you haven’t let go of the old patterns, the old habits, and the old ways of thinking. The secret to a successful business, is to change you . The secret is to know and face the truth. You must know and face the truth about yourself, your idea’s about success, and your own thinking.

You must change the way you think about success, and that will help change the way you act!

Nothing changes until you know and face the truth, and make the choice to change… and believe you can do it NOW! That’s how to have success in your business!

College marketing professors and media sales “professional” like to tell small business owners that you need to “get your name out there.” That the purpose of you placing ads is to “build your brand.” And that when you “Do image advertising” customers will recognize your company/brand.

The say that once consumers recognized your brand, they will automatically buy from you.

But the truth is, this is a lie.

Let me explain this in a way that may makes sense, lets say you finely save up enough money to buy your first house. You do a conventional loan at 10% down and move in! WOW, you did it, you became a homeowner.

The first couple of months your pretty stressed with your new monthly payment, but your making it. Now this is where the story goes bad, you get laid off at work after only 3 months into your new home, and on the way back to that dream house you get into a car accident. Lucky for you, you walk away without a scratch.

For the sake of time lets just fast forward to 6 month from your car accident. You have no option but to give up the house before it goes into bankruptcy. Why? you haven’t been able to find a job that you can ride the bus too, because you didn’t make the car insurance payment because you had a mortgage. Here’s some more bad news, in the nine months you have lived in your new home, you have made no payments towards the principal, you were only paying the interest. You have NO Equity! It doesn’t matter how much you think it’s worth, it’s only going to sell for what the bank can get for it.

The reason it’s a lie, is that you have NO brand equity!

Now lets talk about your business. When people see your colors and fancy logo design, the first question they have is, “what does your company do?” If they even care. The truth is that because your brand has no equity it’s has no value. What your brand need to do first is to communicate how your products/services provide benefits to those that buy. Don’t believe me? Just go to the next business trade show and walk the isles and tell me what you find. Lots of pretty logo’s and designs, but no way of telling what they do!

If this is still unclear than click on the Buyers Formulas (watch the video’s) and learn the TRUTH about marketing, and what and why people will start buying from you! (Hint: it’s not because you have a pretty logo)

We were all told when growing up, that we need to “Practice”

All of us growing up learned to practice to get good at something: sports, music, or any other disciplines.

But is that true for business owners too?

Feeling defeated in business and life pushes us further into our cycle of trying harder. You think to yourself, “I just need to try harder” or,” I need to keep practicing (like some professional athlete or an Olympian) becoming successful is difficult enough without this “Try harder!” mentality we force upon ourselves. It sucks us into a cycle of “I must do better,”“I ought to be spending more hours at work,” or “I should be more successful by now.”

Let me share with you one of my “aha” about this practice mentality!

My golf coach took me out onto the practice range one day after just hiring him to help me play better golf. He asked me to look out on the practice range and tell him what I saw. I said, “It looks like everybody is here today, and the range is full.” That seemed pretty obvious! That’s not what he saw through his eyes, and then, went and dropped this bomb on me. He said, “What I see is, 95% of these want to be golfers, practicing their mistakes.”

What he was trying to help me to see was that unless these “want to be golfers” learn the basic skills of the game, all of their “try harder” mentality of just more practice was hurting them. They were all just practicing their mistakes.

They like so many others in business and life have not been given the basic skills on “how to” know and do what the 5% are always practicing. For me my biggest “aha” came when I went from my try harder mentality, too practicing what the 5% know and do. Practice does not make perfect (or successful) but perfect practice will.

Here the problem with your “killer” idea … no one will buy it! Ouch! Hurts doesn’t it? But I rather tell you the truth now, than have you blow through 2014 wasting thousands of dollars (and possibly all your savings) and spending another year “hoping” it will work out for you.

The one thing that needs to happen this year is for you to turn your opportunity into a scalable business that will take your seeds (of a dream) and make it a realty.

Now let me hit you with something that you will be uncomfortable with!

The great Michael Jordan:

Missed more than 9000 shots!

Lost almost 300 games.

26 times missed the game winning shot!

Plus, failing over and over and over again in “life”. Yes, you read that right!

So what does that have to do with your business being successful?

Well, first you better start realizing that success comes through failure. That’s why you need to look for opportunities instead of “killer” idea’s. Most people will start with and “idea” and don’t consider if the idea can make money or even worst, if the idea is scalable. Why is scalable so important? Because if you don’t have buyers your going to fail.

One option it to do a lean start up … (you can watch here)

There are plenty ways to fail in business so learn to fail fast!

There’s always risk in starting a business, but to minimize that risk and to work in a way that is lean and is part of the buyers cycle, will help you to have an opportunity to thrive.